Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution - Adrian Desmond, James Moore

Happy Darwin Day!

"In this remarkable book, Adrian Desmond and James Moore restore the missing moral core of Darwin’s evolutionary universe, providing a completely new account of how he came to his shattering theories about human origins."
—Scientific American

There has always been a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? It’s difficult to overstate just what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of evolution. So it must have been something very powerful—a moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it—that propelled him. And that moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of slavery.

Leading apologists for slavery in Darwin’s time argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, with whites created superior. Darwin abhorred such "arrogance." He believed that, far from being separate species, the races belonged to the same human family. Slavery was therefore a "sin," and abolishing it became Darwin’s "sacred cause." His theory of evolution gave all the races—blacks and whites, animals and plants—an ancient common ancestor and freed them from creationist shackles. Evolution meant emancipation. Amazon

PS Illustrations included.

Related to: Darwin Day Selections

File size: 5.21 MB
Format: epub


https://www.rapidshare.com/files/1816087196/Adrian.Desmond-Darwins.Sacred.Cause.epub.rar

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